War Historian to Speak

Peter
Hammond Liddle, director of The Second World War Experience Centre in Leeds,
England, and a foremost authority on World Wars I and II, will speak at Sam
Houston State University Feb. 6.

Liddle's Distinguished Lecturer Series presentation is scheduled for 2 p.m.
in the Dr. James S. Olson Auditorium in the newly occupied Academic Building
4. A dedication ceremony for the auditorium and a reception will follow Liddle's
presentation.

The new building at 20th Street and Ave. I will house the history, psychology
and philosophy, and library science departments, as well as a Student Advising
and Mentoring Center and a new computer services laboratory.

Liddle is the author or primary editor of 19 books on the two world wars.
He has also authored highly respected articles, professional papers, scripts,
and audio presentations, and has organized a number of museum exhibitions
as well as developed video and television productions.

"Dr. Liddle's accomplishments are monumental, and the collections he has
built are invaluable to the study of military history," said Phillip Parotti,
Sam Houston State University English professor and author.

Liddle founded and edited two significant journals of military history: "The
Poppy and the Owl," about World War I, and "Everyone's War," which was published
by The Second World War Experience Centre.

His two most recent publications make extensive use of material from The Second
World War Experience Centre, including photographs. They are "The Great World
War 1914-1945: Lightning Strikes Twice," which examines contrasts and similarities
of experience in the two world wars, and "For Five Shillings a Day: Experiencing
War 1939-45."

He is also credited with the founding of two of the world's most important
war archival collections.

His first great effort was "The Liddle Collection," which he began compiling
more than 30 years ago and completed while at the University of Leeds from
1988-1999. That collection documents the experiences of more than 6,900 men
and women during World War I.

His present work is a similar project relating to World War II. He and his
assistants have traveled widely interviewing thousands of men and women about
their personal war experiences, capturing each of their records on tape.

They also collect letters, diaries, journals, records, maps and equipment
documenting every aspect of the second world war.

The poignancy of their work is illustrated by a memory Liddle related in
1999 at the dedication of The Second World War Experience Centre. He told
of being handed a prototype longbow by a man who had been ordered in 1940
to devise such a weapon "in the emergency of a possible invasion and the
acute shortage of firearms."

"He placed the bow he had made in my hands," Liddle related at the dedication. "I
found it then, and find it now, hard to imagine any single item which could
more tangibly convey to school children, students, indeed to everyone, a
clearer sense of our state of readiness at that time.

"Such is the educative power of a single three-dimensional item and the
man instructed to make it-had given it to me-what a thrill-and what a lesson."

Liddle is known internationally for his authoritativeness and lecturing
skill. He has presented professional papers at international conferences
in France, Germany, Canada, Russia and Egypt, and lectured extensively in
Canada and the United States.

In the United States, specifically, he has lectured at Yale, Georgetown,
University of Ohio, Nebraska, Texas A&M, North Texas State, Oakland University,
Florida State and The Citadel.

Liddle follows previous Distinguished Lecturers who, since the program's
inception in 1980, have included former President George Bush, Polish President
Lech Walesa, historian Arthur Schlesinger, economist John Kenneth Galbraith,
astronaut John Young, and others.